The UPS man brought a CF wireless network card plug-in for my PDA. Anxious to try it out, as my LAN is CAT 5 wired, I went outside in search of a WiFi [free] hotspot. A local innovative tech-hip restaurant was my test site. It was really trick to be able to access the WorldWideWeb and connect to information so effortlessly – without phone jack or wires. Project todo list: Design a web page application to sniff and detect the itty-bitty 3.5 inch TFT of a handheld device! I did note, during the experience, that email sent from my PDA did not go out. I realize that, due to legal and liability issues that the restaurant likely blocked all ports — save port :80 for internet browsing. It would not be kosher for a customer/patron to send spam, threatening messages or illegal [porn] content with their email client. It could or would be traced back to the point of origin – the free network access provider – and thus expose the local establishment to complicity. The family looks at me strangely as I peer deep into the PocketPc absorbed and oblivious to the conversation of the moment. What! You thought it was just by coincidence that we chose THIS place to come and eat and I just happened to bring my DEVICE along?

The Electronic Entertainment Expo in So Cal was a topic on GoodMorning America this a.m. Instead of letting us peek at some of the spectacular achievements in the computer gaming world, they hi-jacked it putting their own self serving political spin on the story. The theme became ‘violence against women’ as they showed clips from Vice-City and some Kung-Fu fighter action. What they failed to point out to the audience (drawn in out of context) was that (and every gamer knows this), in these shoot-um ups anybody can be a victim. Probably a disproportionate number of men get killed. But nobody complains about that… In the case of the female opponent: Yes, in the clip it was a loosing battle but that doesn’t have to be! The game designers are sensitive to this. Heck! They want women to buy and enjoy these products too. All story characters male, female, or monster have design attributes featuring varying strengths, skills, agility – advantages and disadvantages. Nobody has them all. And all are fragile. (unless you discover the ‘god’ cheat mode, heh heh) The woman in this clip was loosing, and yes when you loose the red pixels fly, but not by design. Anyone (except the monster) can be the winner. Even the girl! It’s player’s skill.

I built my own LAN, and learned to administrate, but have no clue as to the how or why of it. The nuts ‘n bolts are P.F.M. Furthermore, there are homotrons running amok that have caused a glitch. At around prime time each day the Internet goes down. The computers still talk to each other but for some reason the email stops and most web sites become inaccessible. A cry of disgust will ring out from some corner of the house and I become Nick Burns, Office Computer Guy, taking full blame. There are so many possibilities, and I have no diagnostic means. Is it my ISP — somehow detecting excessive usage and blocking ports? Some kind of incompatibility between firewall, spybot software, ad blocker, or antivirus? S’mans online game, (quirky resource hog) Everquest ? The cable modem? Network Router? I’ve tried to sleuth the system by isolating PCs, rebooting, cycling power to the hardware and have learned nothing. Until yesterday when the trail turned hot. I’ve got it figured out that task scheduler allows Microsoft’s Windows Update to phone home once each day. Just happened to coincide with yesterday’s internet freeze. Could this be? Anybody? Anybody? Beuhler?

Recently added to this site – cutting edge stuff: RSS Feed. This is a form of XML, an extension of HTML tags, allowing any system or platform to access and render my information on their web site, PDA, cell phone etc. One can collocate various RSS feeds from independent newsites for inclusion in one central web page. Rather then visit numerous bookmarked websites, downloading all of the fluff (banner ads, graphics, errata) cut right to the chase. I use a feedreader app aka a news aggregator. No programing skills required. Merely subscribe to the [geek] news that you want to read.

With some PHP code from emptypages I’ve added a weather module to this site. The data is pulled from the National Weather Service so it does not arrive encumbered with ad banners or logo. As another neat feature the data is archive cached in a MySQL database for a length of time so that repeated hits don’t burden the NOAA server.

Geeezz. I hate it when that happens… A critical mistake that ruins the project. I’m restructuring a contact database that has become large and complex. I want to separate the data into several tables. I will build a relational (one-to many) db using an SQL query to join them. The trick is to import the data to the new structure. It’s tedious. I drafted several queries to display the data (so far so good) and then wrote some coldfusion code that would allow one to edit | insert | delete. That’s where I screwed the pouch. My insert statement had a slight syntactical error (you should hardly notice) which, instead of updating the fields of a single record, overwrote the records of the ENTIRE database. Damn. There’s no un-do button for this one…

Keep incremental back-ups.

Two computers — one monitor. The AB switch now allows alternation between them. This is necessary because I pulled my (original, first-ever-computer) ZEOS 486SX out of retirement. The old machine obsolete with VESA local bus and memory challenged might still be useful as a learning test bed. The other computer provides access to online help content, at least until I can get the LINUX OS to recognize its peripherals, and I’ve been using it for Google searches while typing cryptic instructions from the console command line on the other. After 3 or 4 relevant chapters and Appendix A & B in the manual, a HD format and re-partition I did a RedHat LINUX installation. The challenge is to install a driver for the network card. The driver is attainable as a free download but it is a source file, meaning that once downloaded and transferred over via floppy it must be compiled. So I use the windows machine to search for and retrieve the file. To get the file from the floppy to the LINUX system I had to learn how to mount the floppy drive. With the operating system that we all know and love all one does is open Windows Explorer and drag and drop. Takes a couple of mouse clicks. The floppy drive, fd1, I found in a directory called /dev/ (device). The command, and command line arguments, look like this: mount -t msdos /dev/fd1 /home/mnt/floppy. (Sounds simple but I had to read and learn this first) Finally, to transfer the file: cp /home/mnt/floppy/stl8139.c /home/temp. Whew! Except then I discovered that the software to compile the source file was on the RedHat Install CD 🙁 I researched and tracked down this one gcc-6.2.9-15.0.i386.rpm! after visiting and pouring over gcc.org and various other GNU and open source software web sites. To cut to the chase, after screwing around with trying to compile the driver source I discovered another command called locate which might just allow me to find the file ready to go. Another fork in the road because ‘locate’ wasn’t working. Happens that I must first build a db with script from a cron.date folder. More research. Mission accomplished even though I was thrown a kink with required script file misprinted in the manual it was similar and I gave it a shot. stl18139.o turned up in /usr/lib/2.2.2-15/etc . I struggled with this (must be fatigue at this point) file because the ‘l’ next to the 8 looks a whole heck of a lot like a ‘1’ and as we all know the computer does not forgive a syntax typo. Moving on, I had my file and could taste victory when the insert module, insmod command bombed. device active or not found… Okay, don’t give up yet! It’s early. Perhaps the kernel should be updated. This I understand is the most advanced thing that you can do in LINUX, so I wasn’t too hopeful. Every single tutorial on this tack was a variation on a theme. More .rpm files to download and these too large for a floppy so I had to burn them on a CD first. The kernel rebuild didn’t fly either. Too many absent file dependencies. Bail. Try a fresh re-install, I thought I had seen a dialog config option for network cards — nope —- same error msg. Arghhhhh!! I figure I’m computer literate but then I think to myself; I’m just trying to make it run (with varying degrees of success). There is actually somebody(s) out there in geekdom, godlike, that designed the thing from scratch! Impressive, no? If I could just get a hold of one of them! Time to put the keyboard down. It’s been total immersion for two days — two computers one exhausted overloaded pc nerd. Maybe after some rest… There’s a solution to the puzzle.

I spied a *free* direct network connection in my hotel room and thought that I’d give it a whirl. It was dead. I suppose I could have tried to reboot my machine or a few more tricks but it was late so I bailed and hooked up to the desk phone instead. I have a lengthy list of local dial-up numbers (admittedly some old ones) accumulated, one for each layover, so I clicked connect and disappeared to unpack my bag. I returned to grab my email to discover that the connection had failed: no answer. Hmmmmm. I decided to dial it again — this time listening for the handshake and or phone feedback through the rather feeble internal pc speaker. I wanted to make sure that the hotel phone wasn’t locked, that the modem was working, that number was still valid. I learned that the number did in fact did dial and was ringing numerous times but did not pick up. I was searching for a way to end the attempt (instead of waiting) when the phone picked up. I strained to hear, expecting a canned recorded message from Ma Bell saying that “the number you have dialed…” etc. but imagine my surprise to hear a rather live sleepy voice answer: “hello? hello? —– hello?”. I felt badly. At 1030 pm, I know I it would have been somewhat irritated. Shame that the phone company would stick a residence with a number formerly used by machines. You move into town and call the phone company for new service and they say sure, here’s a phone number that is available and in-active. When we rolled into town years ago we blindly accepted a number that, thru luck of the draw, happened to be one digit off from a local hotel. Can you imagine the occasional kinds of calls we get during the odd hours? Man! I thought that we had it bad but I see not. Maybe the pc could be used to sleuth a candidate phone number before we commit to live with it. Now — if I can just figure out how to get on-line…

The Banner of Hope site continues to make progress. The domain name www.bannerofhope.com has been registered and fully recognized by the internet DNS, meaning this URL is accessible anywhere in the world. Further, the PayPal function is now configured and useable. Finally, we installed an secure, easy to use interface that will allow message posting and editing viewable to the public side. This eliminates the need to open and mess with the HTML. No computer geek skills required! Mutiple authorship can be enabled to allow collaboration and or delegated responsibility.

I found How Al-Qaida Site Was Hijacked to be an interesting read. It gives insight into the domain name underworld. I was especially intriqued by the use of anti-cybersquatting.